Monday, 24 December 2012

The true spirit of the Christmas season is surprisingly difficult to
summarise. Initially a Christian
festival, the midwinter holiday across the Western world now encompasses a much
broader church of pagan ritual and secular trimmings. Equally, the portrayal of Christmas in the Arts is as challenging to package as a giftwrapped bicycle.

Happy Warholidays!

Christmas was pretty straightforward for artists working
during the theocratic times of the Classicists. Classical art was dominated by the Christian
church and was without pretence in its non-nonsense approach to Christmas as purely the celebration
of the Nativity story and the birth of the Christ child. Enduring examples include Giorgione’s
Nativity (1507) from the Renaissance and Gerard van Honthorst’s Adoration of
the Shepherds (1622)from the Baroque tradition – but the supporting cast of infant Messiah, Virgins,
Angels, Kings, shepherds and assorted farm animals can be found in literally thousands
of works.

Gerard van Honthorst, Adoration of the Shepherds (1622)

This unwavering religious embodiment of the festival would
continue until artists began to creep out from under the waning yoke of the
patronage of the church. It is not until the 1800’s that we first see the gaze of
the artist turned from the Romantic and the Divine to the rather more Humanistic.

The Christmas embodied by this next wave of artists focused not on the
Nazarene or the Magi but instead on the more contemporary recording of families
coming together, celebrating hearth and home.
There are innumerable examples of this work across the European and North
American art movements of the late 19th and early 20th Century.

Viggo Johansen’s A Happy Christmas (1891), Carl Larsson’s
Christmas Eve (1904) and Albert Chevallier Tayler’s The Christmas Tree (1911)
reflect this shift in festive themes.
These depictions of a family Christmas, from the Impressionists to the
Arts and Crafts Movement, all share a common whimsical theme to the point that
they become almost indistinguishable.

Albert Chevallier Tayler, The Christmas Tree (1911)

For many it is the Victorian Christmas that conjures a
romantic ideal of the season and it is around these vignettes that the
contemporary image of Christmas begins to solidify, like goosefat around a tray
of roasted potatoes and frost on the rosy cheeks of the cockney street
urchin.

Even now, the perfect image of the Dickensian Christmas
holds much inexplicable allure – perhaps in its evocation of simpler times when
extreme poverty, inequality and austerity seemed to do little to dampen the
determined celebration of the season.

Norman Rockwell, Christmas (1950)

Clearly following in this tradition is later American artist Norman
Rockwell, whose unashamed celebrations of American family and small-town
values make him, for many, the unofficial biographer of the American
Christmas. By the 1950’s, however,
Rockwell was already becoming a lone atavistic voice in a changing cultural
landscape.

The Modernists were coming and they had little time for
santa, snowmen, tinsel and glitter. Such
whimsy was so much poisoned eggnog to the carefully constructed outsider status
of the Modern Artist; but that isn’t to say some of them didn’t at least try.

Salvador Dalí’sAllegory of an
American Christmas (1934, left) and Christmas (Noel) (1946, right)

As might be expected, Salvador Dalí’s Allegory of an
American Christmas (1934) isn’t so much iconoclastic as just downright
perplexing. Featuring the unfamiliar
festive motif of an airplane flying into an egg, it is said to symbolise
Dalí’s rebirth of creativity following his emigration to America. In Dali’s defence, the use of Christmas in
the title was simply a reference to the season of his arrival in his adopted
country. He would attempt to redress this
misdirection with the more unambiguous Christmas (Noel) (1946) – although it’s
only in the company of the earlier work that this painting could ever really be
described as unambiguous.

In the latter half of the Twentieth Century artists
began to embrace the dark arts of marketing and this most vigorously
commercialised of all festivals once again attracted attention.

Perhaps inspired by his early incarnation as a commercial
artist, Andy Warhol produced a wealth of charming festive merchandising during
his career, featuring every permutation of wreath, ribbon and shining
star. Some may suggest that Warhol was
making a high camp comment on consumerism but the sheer proliferation of
Christmas imagery suggests that maybe Andy just loved Christmas. The fact that it is so difficult to clearly
identify Warhol’s intentions leaves him simultaneously playing the role of both
David Bowie and Bing Crosby in this Seasonal house party.

The difficulty of deconstructing novelty and ephemera is
that there is little more to find wrapped inside than more novelty and ephemera. Furthermore, Christmas itself has its own magical powers
of assimilation. Consider the gaudy
ironic pop culture constructions of artist Jeff Koons. As far as I am aware,
Koons has yet to tackle Christmas directly and yet his absurdist ironic imagery
has proven remarkably popular repackaged in unironic Christmas cards and
decorations.

Ron English, Merry Christmas (2011), Banksy, I'm Out of Bed... (2011)

Even the more aggressive attempts to satirise and eviscerate
the season from artists such as Ron English and the ubiquitous Banksy result in
images that still sit cosy and comfortably neutered on the mantle between
Nativity scenes and comical cartoon reindeer.

Instead, perhaps the most subversive, important and
undoubtedly influential Christmas artist is the little-known commercial painter
Haddon Sundblom. It was Sundblom who created Santa Claus, at least in the form we all now know and love, as a seasonal advertising mascot for dentist worrying soft drinks company Coca-Cola. Whilst he was not the first artist to create
an image of Santa - the curious fusion of various folkloric figures with the
Christian Saint Nicolas - it was Sundblom's 1931 vision thatcreated the archetypal jolly,
round, white-bearded man now recognised the world over.

With his brand-approved red coat, white collar and cuffs, white-cuffed
red trousers and black leather belt and boots, Coca-Cola’s Santa artworks would change our perception of Father Christmas forever and would be adopted as the popular image of the North Pole's most famous resident.However, the fact that Sundblom's Santa was so quickly extricated from his corporate beginnings and subsumed back into his mythical roots, once again proves the resilience of the season to irony and commercial appropriation alike.

In a way, this is further proof that, despite a swollen rolling snowball of confused influences and meanings to many people, the true spirit of Christmas might really just be that spirit itself.

Mat is a sporadic maker of art, troubler of words and regularly finds himself entangled in miscellaneous quixotic creative ventures.His website is currently on a period of extended leave but you can follow his occasionally troubling stream of consciousness on Twitter.